Week 7 proved everything we thought we knew about college football in 2017 was BS

Just when you thought the season was chalk, Week 7 smacked us upside the head. Helmet-to-helmet? Targeting? Let’s go to a booth review because I’m dizzy, and you should be, too.

Turns out, halfway through the season, half of what you thought you knew about 2017 is B.S.

Alabama-Clemson III! Forget the re-rematch for a moment. After
Syracuse Orange took out the Tigers on Friday night, that looks about as likely to happen for the nation championship as Baywatch II does getting greenlit.

Sooners vs. Pokes for the Big 12!
TCU Horned Frogs looks like a playoff team (or, at least, it should be ranked in the top four).
Oklahoma Sooners jumped on the back of its quarterback with the big mouth and even bigger heart in the Red River Showdown. But OU (and
Oklahoma State Cowboys) are still looking up at the Horned Frogs.

Clemson Tigers and
Florida State Seminoles run the ACC! Miami is the league’s only undefeated team, and everyone in the Atlantic division is looking up at
NC State Wolfpack.

These two are dead men walking in the SEC! Ed Orgeron has his job back at LSU, and Kevin Sumlin may well hang on at
Texas A&M Aggies after improving to 5-2. Meanwhile, Butch Jones might as well turn in his clichés, along with his clipboard. It’s sooo over in Knoxville. Bret Bielema (
Arkansas Razorbacks) better watch out, too, and who knows about Gus Malzahn at
Auburn Tigers.

Ohio State Buckeyes is out of the playoff! The Buckeyes have won five straight after being embarrassed 31-16 by the Sooners. They’ve outscored opponents by an average of 42 points per game (though the schedule is about to get a lot tougher)

This is what we paid for — at least those who signed up for Google Fiber. A laser-fast account of world events. The problem with college football is that it took about a month and a half to shake up our world.

That adds up to three top 10s going down this week alone, for starters.

When the top 25 ballots come out, voters will have to think long and hard about keeping No. 2 Clemson in the top four. Losing to Syracuse 27-24 on Friday night is one thing. Playing quarterback
Kelly Bryant at all is another. Bryant looked hobbled with his injured ankle — before he was knocked out with a concussion. When freshman
Zerrick Cooper had to come in cold, that sort of did it.

There is every chance this is the
Pittsburgh Panthers loss Clemson suffered in 2016. The Tigers may merely regroup and win the rest of their games. But the ACC looks tougher and deeper this year. No. 11 Miami (5-0) now has established itself as at least the league’s second-best team with a couple of last-second wins over Florida State and — on Saturday —
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, 25-24.

The No. 5 Huskies played like dogs. Late Saturday, we got one of the most inexplicable results of the season as
Arizona State Sun Devils beat
Washington Huskies 13-7, ending a Sun Devils streak of 11 straight games giving up at least 30 points, the most in FBS. The Pac-12 becomes the first Power Five not to have at least one undefeated team. Not a good playoff look halfway through the season. Arizona State beat its first top-five team in 21 years.

The Canes have literally fought a hurricane (Irma) and emerged as a feel-good story of the season’s first half.
Darrell Langham has caught the two biggest passes of his life the last two weeks. First, he beat Florida State with a last-second touchdown pass. Langham, a junior, came into Saturday’s game with four career catches. He caught five for 100 yards against the Yellow Jackets.

With that goatee, Mark Richt is starting to look like the guy who cleans your pool instead of the coach cleaning opponents’ clocks. Hey, whatever floats your house boat in Coral Gables,
Florida Gators. In Year 14 since joining the ACC, hope is alive for the Canes finally winning their division title. “There is something special going on here,” Goatee Guy said.

It’s a good thing they don’t pay Gary Patterson by the hour. The TCU coach had wait out two weather delays with the rest of the No. 6 Horned Frogs at
Kansas State Wildcats. Seven hours after the game was supposed to start (noon ET), five hours after it actually did start, TCU (6-0) remained the Big 12’s best playoff hope with a 26-6 win over K-State. If you’re counting, there were more weather delays (two) than Wildcat touchdowns (none).

And those six points were one less turnover than No. 8
Washington State Cougars had (seven) Friday night against Cal. The Cougars may be done, but their coach isn’t with this epic rant.

What happened in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on Saturday certainly won’t play well in Auburn — perhaps for the rest of the season. No. 10 AU blew a 20-0 first-half lead, losing to
LSU Tigers 27-24. Halfway through that game, Gus Malzahn looked like he was coaching a playoff game. At the end, ol’ Gus was watching his back. The winds can shift quickly on The Plains. Oh, and remember Coach O? You’re not going to believe this but Orgeron’s Tigers (5-2, 3-1 SEC) control their own fate in the SEC West.

The Butch Jones Watch is getting just plain boring. The end of his tenure is inevitable. The over/under on
Tennessee Volunteers‘s next touchdown is open-ended. After a 15-9 loss to
South Carolina Gamecocks, the Vols haven’t scored a touchdown in 10 quarters — or since the Fidget Spinner was still in.

Speaking of fads, No. 9 Ohio State isn’t one. When
Nebraska Cornhuskers‘s J.D. Spielman scored in the third quarter at Lincoln, Nebraska, that ended a streak of 97 consecutive points by the Bucks against the Huskers. After losing to Oklahoma in Week 2, the Buckeyes made Nebraska their fifth straight victim. The Buckeyes are back in playoff contention. The Big Ten schedule gets real again in a couple of weeks against
Penn State Nittany Lions.

They don’t ask how, they ask how much — you can take. In the case of Mayfield, he took a lot. Oklahoma won the Red River Showdown by gritting its back and jumping on the back of its quarterback. You know, the one with the big mouth and even bigger heart.

No. 12 OU’s 29-24 win over
Texas Longhorns started out like a game it should have won by four touchdowns. Then the Horns gritted their own set of choppers. True freshman
Sam Ehlinger looked like he had carved his name in this game’s noble history rallying the Horns back from a 20-point deficit.

In the first of what we should all hope is their own 10-Year War, this was a classic between Lincoln Riley and Tom Herman.

There was a point late in the fourth quarter when a trainer was reaching up under his pads of Mayfield, massaging his right shoulder. That was the one a Texas defender fell on in the second half. Mayfield rallied himself and his team to throw a game-winning 59-yard touchdown pass to
Mark Andrews with 6:53 left.

Mayfield didn’t plant a flag himself (teammates did), but he did keep the Sooners in the playoff race. Halfway through the season, that should make some heads spin.